Places of horror, traces of pain

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For my last days in Berlin, I decide to immerse myself once more in German history, the more gruesome aspects of it, in fact. First I visit the 'Topography of Terror', an outdoor museum located on the site where the headquarters of both Gestapo and SS were between 1933-45. The exhibition ends up being rather disappointing, mostly due to the fact that the buildings were largely destroyed by Allied bombings during the War, and subsequently demolished. Still, I just don't find an 'original cellar wall' exciting or interesting in a city that has so much more on offer. The documentary centre, on the other side, is extremely well made and provides infinitely detailed information on all aspects of the systematic terror carried out by those two infamous institutions during the Third Reich. Once again I'm amazed at how the culprits mostly got away with their crimes, which is shown by biographies of Gestapo officials. Typically after the War they would get sentenced to 5-10 years in prison by Allied tribunals or courts but be paroled after a year or two, only to live into old age somewhere in Germany. Some take up where they left off and become police officers or civil servants, not rarely in high positions, others are tried again decades later for crimes against humanity, but most are deemed unfit for trial. It's infuriating that after all they did, many of them could still live happy and prosperous lives without being brought to justice, and without repenting their actions.

The following day I make my way to the Eastern district of Lichtenberg to visit the former Stasi-prison Hohenschönhausen. Actually, it started as a Soviet internment camp, primarily for Nazis and those suspected to be, in May 1945. Living conditions in the camp were atrocious, and within a year an estimated 3,000 detainees perished either from beatings and torture or from freezing to death in their unheated cells. The dead bodies were buried in mass graves in the vicinity of the prison, or simply disposed of in bomb craters or rubbish dumps. Most of the internees were only slightly involved in the Nazi system, and many were arrested in consequence of unsubstantiated denunciations, as was the case with famous actor Heinrich George, father of German actor Götz George, who had acted in some of the most infamous Nazi propaganda films before and during WWII. In 1946 he was transferred to former Nazi concentration camp Sachsenhausen, where he died of starvation shortly after.
After the Ministry of State Security (MfS; colloquially known as Stasi) was created in the newly founded GDR, the underground prison came under its jurisdiction in March 1951, and opponents of the Communist dictatorship, disgraced politicians and 'unwanted elements' were kept there from then on. In the beginning, the methods remained the same - ceaseless interrogation, beatings, water torture, sleep deprivation, until physical violence turned into psychological cruelty at the end of the 50s.

That switch is most graphically presented by the guide of the tour I join. He is a former inmate, but only drops a hint here and there about his incarceration during his elaborate descriptions of the political situation of East Germany and the living conditions in the prison. We first descend into the 'U-Boat', a bunker-type cell complex where most of the internees during the Soviet administration found their end in the damp, windowless cells, equipped only with a bunk bed and a bucket. Light bulbs were on day and night, interrogations took place during the night and were accompanied by threats and physical violence. The prisoners were forced into making confessions by being deprived of sleep, being made to stand for hours at a time, or being kept in water-filled cells. After the prison was transferred to the MfS, a sauna was installed for the prison staff in the former U-Boat.

The guide recounts how dissidents were picked up from their homes in the middle of the night, assured they only had to accompany them for 'clarification in a certain issue', driven in a minuscule dark cell in the back of a prison van-in disguise for hours around Berlin so they lost all sense of orientation, and finally incarcerated in Hohenschönhausen. They never found out where exactly they were, they couldn't have any contact with friends or family, they never even saw any other prisoners, adding to the feeling of complete isolation and sensory deprivation. In the rare event that they shared a cell with other prisoners, some or all of them were Stasi stool pigeons. Usually the only way for them to contact other prisoners was by carefully knocking on the wall at night, but even then the answers they got could have been the Stasi's.
As we walk through the corridors, nausea wells up in my guts, not only from the guide's explanations, but also from the stuffy air, a mixture of asbestos trapped in the walls and other chemicals, thinners and cleaning agents that the eye cancer-causing linoleum appears to emanate. After a while I start feeling the trepidation, in a lesser form, that the pitiful prisoners must have felt for months, or even years, on end.

The interrogation rooms are just the stuff that nightmares are made of. They are a manifestation of the power of the totalitarian regime and of the ceaseless suspicions, denunciations and surveillance, wrapped in the most horrendous petty bourgeois-furniture and wallpaper imaginable. They even kept tape recorders inside the cupboards for the purpose of supervising and evaluating the interrogators, and before starting the interrogation, the interrogator himself had to turn it on 'voluntarily'.
Finally, before concluding the tour, the guide tells us his story. He was living in West Germany with his family, unknowingly that his father was an informant for the MfS, when one day, they all were kidnapped and brought to the GDR, as his dad had fallen from grace. He was only 16 years of age and spent the next three years in Hohenschönhausen, undergoing all the interrogations and psychological torture he'd outlined to us previously. They forcibly nationalized him, thus as a citizen of the GDR, he couldn't leave the country even after he was finally dismissed following persistent non-cooperation. When the border with Hungary was opened, he and his parents took refuge in the West German embassy, but they were refused to help despite actually being West German nationals. You could see that when he told this part of the story, there was still considerable bitterness and animosity lingering in him towards the persons responsible. Only in 1984, after countless appeals and applications could he finally return to Hannover, his mother following him after the Wall came down. His father didn't make it, unfortunately. After years of imprisonment he died in the prison hospital under circumstances that have yet to be disclosed following a gall bladder-operation.

Lastly, I take the train out to Oranienburg and walk towards Sachsenhausen Memorial Site to pay my respects to the victims of the Nazi concentration camp. There's no denying that by visiting Auschwitz, Natzweiler-Struthof, several former KGB prisons in Eastern Europe, the Killing Fields and S-21 in Cambodia, countless Jewish museums and other sites of human cruelty and monuments to our infinite ignorance and stupidity, I have become significantly desensitized, calloused.
Now, being an important historical site that depicts its darkest hour and adds to Germany coming to terms with its past, everything in Sachsenhausen is meticulously documented and extensively explained. I walk through the museums, blocks and cellars reading most information panels, but somehow the words don't really sink in. Here's where the prisoners were executed, ok, there's the crematoriums, alright, over yonder was the hospital where inmates were used for medical experimentation, not cool. It feels like I'm listening to a broken record, hearing the same stuff over and over again, as if it has been like that for years. Maybe I've been reading too much, thinking too much about it, trying to understand it. It just doesn't touch me anymore, feels as though I was reading the back of a box of cereals. Not like I don't care, I might have just grown numb.

In the morning at 4am, I get up and take the train to the airport. My Berlin adventure and reconnaissance is over, but the intelligence gathered will definitely serve its purpose in the not-too-distant future.
Cheers for reading this, mates, and make sure to come back for more!

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